Christy Clark has been elected the next leader of the BC Liberal Party — and the province’s new premier.

But how did she pull off the win? Which parts of the province were Clark’s biggest supporters — and which ones went to other candidates? Did Clark draw her support mainly from Liberal ridings or NDP ones? And did Liberal party members follow the lead of whoever their local MLA endorsed?

Check back to this blog post regularly — we’ll be linking to all the leadership race number-crunching as we finish it. And if you’ve got questions about the results, shoot them over to Vancouver Sun reporter Chad Skelton on Twitter at @chadskelton.

NOTE: Click on any image on this blog post to be taken to the full, interactive version of any map or graphic.

Sunday, 9:45pm: I know I said I was done, but… Got some interesting tweets from David Schreck during the last few minutes of my nightshift here arguing that it should be possible to roughly calculate how the BC Liberal leadership race would have played out differently under a one-member, one-vote system based on the accidentally posted total vote results from the third and final ballot. I was a bit skeptical, since we don’t have the “popular vote” totals for the first and second ballots. But Schreck argued you could use the total vote totals for each riding on the third ballot and roughly infer what the total vote totals would have been for the first and second ballots. In other words, while we only know that, say, Clark took 48.1% of the vote in Surrey Newton, knowing that there were 3,210 total votes in Surrey Newton allows us to calculate that Clark got about 1,500 votes from that riding. In contrast, we know that Falcon’s 33.6% of the vote in Peace River South likely only garnered him about 37 votes because only 110 members voted in that riding. Schreck acknowledges these types of calculations aren’t perfect — we can’t know for sure, for example, whether everyone who voted on the first ballot voted on the third (you only had to select two choices). But it does seem to get you close enough to an answer. As I left for the day, Schreck was still working through the figures — I asked him to post a link in the comments to his analysis when he’s done. In the meantime, I did a very quick-and-dirty calculation on the second ballot and came up with Clark with 23,911 votes (44%), Falcon with 18,011 (33%) and Abbott with 12,606 (23%). I wouldn’t hold me to those figures — it was a very quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation in the last few minutes of my shift. But it does suggest that Clark and Falcon still would have gone to the third ballot under a one-member, one-vote system — indeed, Falcon’s lead over Abbott (33-23) is actually quite a bit wider than it was under the weighted system (30-28). And we already know that on the third ballot, even on actual votes, Clark edged out Falcon. So our alternate history doesn’t produce a different winner. Still, an interesting exercise. I’ll be interested to see if Schreck’s calculations are any different. Here are my calculations as a Google Docs file.

Sunday, 8:30pm: Two more “bonus track” graphics — and probably the last for this set of data. A couple different ways to look at the first-ballot results. One graphic looking at the top ridings for each of the four candidates. The other looking at the breakdown in candidate support for each of 85 ridings. The second graphic (shown above) is basically the same data as was in our riding-by-riding chart last night. But, unlike that chart, this allows you to see all the results for every riding on a single page, instead of cycling through each riding one by one.

Sunday, 5:40pm: Unfortunately, the vote results posted by the BC Liberal party Saturday night were in PDF format. In order to do our data analysis and create our maps, we first had to convert all the results into Microsoft Excel files. Converting PDFs into spreadsheets can be a real headache. In order to save others some time, here are the results, nicely formatted as Google Docs files: Round 1, Round 2 and Round 3. We’ve also got the Round 3 Actual Results which the party posted by accident for a few minutes Saturday. You can download all four files as Excel files, CSV or other formats. If you create any interesting data visualizations or maps out of this data, please post a link to them below in the comments.

Sunday, 5:20pm: Our various interactive maps and graphics analyzing Saturday night’s BC Liberal leadership race have received more than 50,000 hits so far. Apparently there are more politics data junkies out there than we thought. So for those with an insatiable appetite for numbers, here are a few bonus tracks. First up, a quick graphic showing whether MLA endorsements mattered: did members in those ridings who went for Abbott, or Falcon, follow their MLA’s lead? In general, yes. Here’s the graphic:

10:43pm: In case you want to drill down to the results in your ne
ighbourhood, here’s the first ballot results by riding. Think that’s probably it for me tonight. Good night everyone!

10:22pm: The gap between NDP- vs. Liberal-held ridings is even more dramatic if you look at the actual number of ridings won by Clark vs. Falcon. Falcon narrowly won Liberal ridings, 26 to 21. Clark almost completely swept the NDP ridings, 32 to 2. Only two NDP ridings won by Falcon: Columbia River-Revelstoke and Victoria-Beacon Hill.

9:32pm: How many votes were cast in each riding in B.C. — from 3,210 in Surrey-Newton to just 110 in Peace River South. Put another way, a Liberal party member in Peace River South’s vote was worth about 30 times what one in Surrey-Newton. This graphic is based on a summary of total votes cast accidentally posted on the BC Liberal Party’s website for a few minutes Saturday night (still available on Scribd).

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the “X” in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.